美食祈祷与恋爱意大利文化 《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 36 (76):再看一眼西西里

《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 36 (76):再看一眼西西里  

I have only a week left here. I'm planning to go back to America for Christmas before flying to India
not only because I can't stand the thought of spending Christmas without my family but also because the next eight months of my journey—India and Indonesia—require a plete repacking of gear. Very little of the stuff you need when you are living in Rome is the same stuff you need when you are wandering around India.
And maybe it's in preparation for my trip to India that I decide to spend this last week traveling through Sicily—the most third-world section of Italy
and therefore not a bad place to go if you need to prepare yourself to experience extreme poverty. Or maybe I only want to go to Sicily because of what Goethe said: "Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is."
But it's not easy getting to or around Sicily. I have to use all my finding-out skills to find a train that runs on Sunday all the way down the coast and then to find the correct ferryboat to Messina (a scary and suspicious Sicilian port town that seems to howl from behind barricaded doors
"It's not my fault I'm ugly! I've been earthquaked and carpet-bombed and raped by the Mafia
too!") Once I've arrived in Messina
I have to find a bus station (grimy as a smoker's lung) and find the man whose job it is to sit there in the ticket booth
mourning his life
and see if he will please sell me a ticket to the coastal town of Taormina. Then I rattle along the cliffs and beaches of Sicily's stupendous and hard-edged east coast until I get to Taormina
and then I have to find a taxi and then I have to find a hotel. Then I have to find the right person of whom to ask my favorite question in Italian: "Where is the best food in this town?" In Taormina
that person turns out to be a sleepy policeman. He gives me one of the greatest things anyone can ever give me in life—a tiny piece of paper with the name of an obscure restaurant written on it
a hand-drawn map of how to find the place.
然而去西西里旅行并不容易。我得用尽所有的探知能力找到周日一路南下抵达海岸的火车，然后找到正确的渡轮前往墨西拿（Messina；一个恐怖可疑的海港城市，似乎从堵住的门后咆哮：“丑并不是我的错！我经历过地震，遭受过地毯式轰炸，还惨遭黑手党蹂躏！”）。一抵达墨西拿后，得找到公车站（和吸菸者的肺一样肮脏），找到坐在卖票亭里自怨自艾的男人，问他能否卖我一张开往滨海小镇陶尔米纳（Taormina）的车票。公车在西西里锋芒毕露的东海岸沿着峭壁和海滩颠簸行驶，直到抵达陶尔米纳后，我得找到一辆计程车，然后找一家旅社。而后得找对人，用意大利语问我最爱的问题：“镇上 哪个地方东西最好吃？”结果在陶尔米纳找到的人是个睡眼惺忪的警察。他给了我最好的东西——一张纸条，上面写了一家地处偏僻的餐厅名字，并有指出餐厅方位的手写地图。
Which turns out to be a little trattoria where the friendly elderly proprietress is getting ready for her evening's customers by standing on a table in her stocking feet
trying not to knock over the Christmas crèche as she polishes the restaurant windows. I tell her that I don't need to see the menu but could she just bring me the best food possible because this is my first night in Sicily. She rubs her hands together in pleasure and yells something in Sicilian dialect to her even-more-elderly mother in the kitchen
and within the space of enty minutes I am busily eating the hands-down most amazing meal I've eaten yet in all of Italy. It's pasta
but a shape of pasta I've never before seen—big
fresh
sheets of pasta folded ravioli-like into the shape (if not exactly the size) of the pope's hat
stuffed with a hot
aromatic puree of crustaceans and octopus and squid
served tossed like a hot salad with fresh cockles and strips of julienned vegetables
all swimming in an olivey
oceany broth. Followed by the rabbit
stewed in thyme.
But Syracuse
the next day
is even better. The bus coughs me up on a street corner here in the cold rain
late in the day. I love this town immediately. There are three thousand years of history under my feet in Syracuse. It's a place of such ancient civilization that it makes Rome look like Dallas. Myth says that Daedalus flew here from Crete and that Hercules once slept here. Syracuse was a Greek colony that Thucydides called "a city not in the least inferior to Athens itself." Syracuse is the link beeen ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Many great playwrights and scientists of antiquity lived here. Plato thought it would be the ideal location for a utopian experiment where perhaps "by some divine fate" rulers might bee philosophers
and philosophers might bee rulers. Historians say that rhetoric was invented in Syracuse
and also (and this is just a minor thing) plot.
I walk through the markets of this crumbly town and my heart tumbles with a love I can't answer or explain as I watch an old guy in a black wool hat gut a fish for a customer (he has stuck his cigarette in his lips for safekeeping the way a seamstress keeps her pins in her mouth as she sews; his knife works with devotional perfection on the fillets). Shyly
I ask this fisherman where I should eat tonight
and I leave our conversation clutching yet another little piece of paper
directing me to a little restaurant with no name
where—as soon as I sit down that night—the waiter brings me airy clouds of ricotta sprinkled with pistachio
bread chunks floating in aromatic oils
tiny plates of sliced meats and olives
a salad of chilled oranges tossed in a dressing of raw onion and parsley. This is before I even hear about the calamari house specialty.